Asmond I wanna explain to you real quick about why I disagree with what you said about spending money on a game. Using your own words it’s designed as a smoke screen to make it harder to know what you paid for. So it’s not 100% the person spending money in that situation. I believe they are victims because the company put them into that situation. Let me explain with an example: I know that there is a hiking trial that’s very popular and well traveled. So I decide to put bear traps along it for fun. Now if someone gets caught in the bear trap is it their fault? I just feel like you’re participating in a bit of victim blaming. Also the analogy of the person partying every weekend doesn’t really line up because they aren’t paying for arbitrary tokens and gems designed to obfuscate the actual price tags of the drinks or food. I just trying to give you genuine criticism because I love you content but i just felt that what you said was (and I mean this the nicest way) kinda irresponsible. Because it encourages victim blaming and letting these disgusting companies off the hook.
@@thebattlemageXD could you blame the first guy who hit your bear trap? No. How many people later would you start wondering if we should stop talking about victim blaming? If 10,000 people walked into your bear traps that you kept laying, at some point it becomes a different conversation. I'm trying to imagine if you financially profited off of laying bear traps and for some unfathomable reason the authorities did nothing. With your permission I'd like to regularly use this analogy in conversations in the future as I think it's humorous to think through and analyze. Enjoy your day.
How also about a limit on how many new stuff appears in a cash shop in a week... like right now, per week, there's thousands in value in rotating cash shop items playing on fomo in most games with microtransactions... in my mind, thats no good either. lets put 100$ limit in how much someone can pay to get everything per week, the game can still make 400 per month to the heavy players, but at least, the damage due to fomo is mitigated... right now, its just pure chaos.
I like when everything in the store cost x + 20 and the smallest amount you can buy is x. So something costs 120 but you have to buy 200 tokens to buy it.
@@Donovarkhallum Activation fees on cards? Nah, it's just a piece of paper with a code on it that you enter in battle net ^^. And some people don't have access to a credit card, it's not the US paystyle all over the world. Prepaid is for some, the only way of actually paying for the game (going to a store, buying the code and putting it into bnet). And even if blizzard has to pay retailers for the prepaid cards, it's just bad optics to put 98 cents on top of the price, make it 30 or 25, not 25.98, it's shit (dishonest) practice.
2:03 Just wanted to point out that while 'Horse Armor' is the ninth best selling dlc for Oblivion, there were only 10 dlc for said game... It only beat out the 'Fighter's Stronghold' which according to Bethesda, would have placed higher than the 'Horse Armor' if they included promotions and freebies. Thus making 'Horse Armor' technically the tenth best selling dlc for Oblivion... out of ten.
Still, a 1 000 000% profit is still worth it when all the costs you had making it was a few hours of work of a single dev. That's what other companies saw. Massive profit margins with the bare minimum of investment.
@@andregon4366 Yeah, that wasn't the relevant metric to bring up about horse armor. The relevant metric was the metric money pile that was the return on investment. The artist(s) + a dev spent about a day apiece to make that armor and implement it. Even if we assume that all of the people involved were paid SUPER well, you are still looking at a ROI that only needs like 1500-2000 players to buy it and break even. Extrapolate that to the current model where you are seeing Valorant selling knife skins directly to player for $30-50+(or in the bundles that quickly reach $100+) and you see investors looking at a week's worth of work on the studio floor equaling the same price point as full fledged games that take 5+ years of dev time. It is no wonder that so many games are being drip fed and kept alive, just to skim the MTX whales that don't care about getting a new game.
I think a lot of people were more fine with "MICROtransactions" if they were actually "micro". 0.10ct for a skin 0.20ct for an emote 0.50ct for a mount
I think that just devalues all the items in the game. Sure, you'd save people from being accountable to wasting money, but it's totally ineffective if they just move to a game that has some sense of reward/achievement for earning/buying items.
true. im surprised that blizzard still has the wow boost going for 60$ even after the level squish. when the number was higher it made more sense (but still expensive), because people dont wanna take the time, but leveling is so fast now.
@@jacobbaartz7710 You're not achieving anything by buying anything or playing a video game for that matter. The entire system is based around giving you a false sense of accomplishment for sitting on your ass doing nothing.
@@martyfromnebraska1045 Oh dude, it's been 2 yrs. My position doesn't even reflect this. Now it's probably gonna be more along the lines of "if you have purchases this cheap, nobody will engage with the game, because comparatively purchases far outweigh in game progression". That's not excusing p2w in any way, I completely avoid anything p2w these days.
I was a Genshin Impact player. I spend a significant amount of money without putting myself in trouble to get what I wanted. It was legitimately the hardest thing to just sotp playing. Because at one point I was tired of the game, nothing was fun but I kept playing just because of FOMO and to validate my thousand of hours and money into the game. Fortunately, I stopped. I don't plan on coming back. I got better things to do.
@@Rihardololz What does it have to do with people being "weak minded", if they fell prey to a predatory system? Genshin knows that they have to connect the new character emotionally for the player to tip them into "gotta try my luck". More over Genshin provides a pity system with a 50% chance of not getting the rate up hero (with the first pity). Thus encouraging said player to spend just enough to reach these pity points. If he is unlucky and does not get the character, they might be inclined to go further for the guaranteed pity roll, since they already started spending to make the investment "worthwhile". I think it's importent to be aware of predatory designs of games. People should know what they are getting into. Obfuscating money and currency is a design choice of the game to make it easier to lure people into those spending habbits. Therefore the game IS to blame for not clearifying their spending systems. Asmon made a really good point. The game often starts selling stuff cheap "just like drug dealers"...
@@Rihardololz no its not weak minded the guy just quit coz there are nothing else to do than plain grinding hell i am a f2p i need to agree that grinding is boring af like it gets too repetative just to build 1-5 characters
@@Rihardololz What a ... uhm, "weak mindset" of you. I think the way you try to "blame" people is just a "weak mindset" way to "defend" a "game fault". If they doesn't like the game, the game is not for them, or describe better, the game IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH to keep its players. That's it, try to accept it, dear "weak mindset"
2:18 this is the part that so many people miss about the MTX/F2P BS we have today: the VAST majority of gamers bought that stuff. For YEARS. No matter how 'silly' it was. Now look at us. TWENTY DOLLARS FOR BLUE?!
As a person working in the legislative branch, no one is banning these sort of business practices any time soon, no matter how younger Congress gets. They have no interests in going against their lobbyists. With these recent Microsoft’s acquisitions, just forget about it. States have to make this an issue, not Congress.
TH-cam gaming channels seem to not talk about how great games are anymore, but rather what's just fucking them up. The kind of thing us "tin-foil hat alt-rights" warned about a long time ago.
@@lobsterrj at a certain point there will be too pay people to pay off. thats why focusing on local pressure to ban is the best. ideally the pressure created by consumers wipes out the profit from the shady business practice. like you wont make your local politician not corrupt, but you will remind them to put their hand out, which makes the publishers think twice about engaging in the shady tactic
Ive said this for a while now. We need another video game crash just like the E.T for Atari in the 80s. It's way out of hand. Changes will maybe be made when politicians kid fall ill to this crap
Issue with monetization practices is that devs think "how do we fit that into the game" instead of "how fitting it into the game will affect the game". Hence, we end up with clown costumes and anime mounts. While stuff like that doesn't exactly ruin the game, it sure waves immersion goodbye. But who cares about immersion in "virtual worlds", amirite?
Well I'd say, it depends. The games where those types of cosmetics are most prevalent aren't "realistic" games, and most of the time they're multiplayer games that are fun/competition first. Obviously this argument doesn't work for everything, there should never be a bright pink skin in something like Tarkov (for immersion because it's actually a key part of the game) or a historical game (for respect of the history). But when it comes down to it, I don't feel immersion is about realism or being grounded in real-ish rules, I think it's just all about being convincing enough that no matter what you put in front of the consumer, they'll accept it. And even then, Immersion isn't everything. The vast majority of people don't buy Battlefield or play Valorant to be immersed, they're there to have fun (the simple and/or gameplay focused kind). I just feel like what a dev puts up on sale should always be for what the game represents. If it's fun first, then go wild, but if immersion is apart of that fun, then restrain yourself.
I wouldn't say immersion because some things fit, id say its disheartening. Why even bother going for cooler harder vanity items when you can just by them out right.🤷♂️ edit Defintely some that SHATTER immersion. For example, remember dead space or even Halo cat ears is a big one.
@@TacticalReaper56 for a free game I think it's okay. The subjective feeling of accomplishment I think is easily overtaken by good live service games for everyone. And it's not like both can't exist together.
The problem is that you assume game companies care about their games. They don't. They care about their profit margin. That's it. They will happily tank their game and throw lasers and spaceships in a medieval setting if it'll make them more money. And if it truly tanks their game to the point they have to shut down the servers? Well you know what? That's fantastic! Don't have to keep paying for hosting! Oh and by the way, here's this other game we've been developing .. you know, just in case you're looking for a "new experience".
Lootboxes are illegal here in Belgium, also in the Netherlands. This is the reason why Lost Ark won't launch here and in the Netherlands, even though all other games that have lootboxes do, they just modify or disable them. draw your own conclusions from that if they won't even do that and prefer to not launch here at all...
well its an mmo so they really can't change anything because they would have to for everyone else not just that region. And it's not big enough a market to justify making a standalone version for it.
The biggest issue with outlawing loot boxes is the case of TCGs. Opening card packs is basically equivalent to opening loot boxes and TCGs have been around for ages in both physical and online forms(MTG online is very old by now, as are other TCG platforms). While loot boxes are slightly different from card packs in TCGs, since there are many forms of loot boxes some are closer to card packs than others which makes it very difficult to make a legal distinction between them. Also there's the whole issue of freedoms, both in terms of individual freedoms to spend money how they wish and for companies to make a living how they choose. Whether it's gambling or not may be obvious to us "veteran gamers" however it's not nearly as obvious in the eyes of the law since lawmakers are as usual very antiquated.
Its interesting you mention the separation of the value through in game currency because I often find myself making the conversions in my head and coming to the conclusion that its not worth it.
With systems like wow token (I do not play wow) you can give a real money value to everything in the game. I have not put my real life money in like that but it is crazy how I can do the math in my head and calculate a real life money amount for what I just achieved in the game. I have calculated that I can make 2,5€/h as an example just by playing the game and getting the in game money and that my character equipments are worth 180€+160€+3x15€ etc. Talk about breaking the immersion.
Asmon's a little off the mark here. He's correct that its to separate value, but that's not the original or most important purpose of tokenizing money. The original and main purpose of tokenizing money is to be region agnostic. They can charge an American USD10 for 100 tokens, while charging an Indian INR4000 (~USD53) and a Chinese person CNY300 (~USD47). Now you might think the benefit of doing it that way is to allow them to predatorily price things according to the wealth of each region. But that's not true. They could (and did) do that anyway before tokenization became commonplace. The real benefit is more technical: It allows the game servers to not know or care about real world currencies, exchange rates, local tax codes, etc. Each regional office can setup their own store page and price things based on local knowledge, and then that all gets aggregated through the use of a single in-game currency. The only currency the game servers need to actually know or care about is the one they've invented. It simplifies things greatly from a design and programming perspective. It simplifies things greatly from a marketing perspective. That includes external marketing such as streamers and social media creators. For example if Asmon complains about something costing $10, that doesn't really mean anything to anyone outside the US. Not only do they have to do the currency conversions but the pricing in their region might not even be the same. On the other hand if Asmon complains about it costing 100 tokens though, everyone on the planet who plays the game will have at least an understanding of how much that thing is worth to them. Certainly, some companies find ways to abuse these systems. There is the issue Asmon brought up with games having so many inter-related currencies that you need a PhD in math to figure out how much you're actually spending on anything. There is the issue I've seen in other posts where the company will charge 120 tokens for everything but only sell tokens in bundles of 100 (forcing you to over-purchase unless you happen to have just the right amount leftover from the last over-purchase to cover the difference). I'm sure there are others. And certainly such systems are frustrating to deal with, but even if we were to somehow get rid of all that shadiness via regulation or divine intervention, having tokenized currency would still be widely utilized because its highly beneficial to the companies for completely practical, not-shady reasons.
i master the arts of reading how fucking expensive in game currency is basically if its 500 gems for the item the clocest cost to buy in shop will be either 120gems 240gems 350gems and 700gems rough estimate
You can time-gate certain loot box prizes in order to pressure payers into forgoing their better judgement and making the purchase out of fear of missing out on something they might want. Thinking is the enemy of the sale, so making payers feel like they'll miss out if they take too long to think about it is key.
The reason I'm against paid games with cosmetic microtransactions is because the default cosmetics in the game are made shit on purpose to make you pay for the good stuff.
I remember a time where I spent over a few hundred dollars on a mobile game in my early collage years. I eventually realised how stupid it was and stopped playing it and am being far more careful with the amount I spend, since I don't get all that much and all of that jazz. So I understood and agree with asmons point on the whole "accidently spend 200 dollars point". You don't "accidentely" spend 200 dollars, you CHOSE to spend 200 dollars which backfired really hard.
it's more like you CHOSE to spend 200 dollars under the influence of myriad of psychological manipulation tactics carefully designed by experts to extract the most money out of you possible. Most people who press download a free game on the app store do not know what they're actually walking into (which they should)
I mean I choose to spend $200 in black desert online. I downloaded the game expecting to spend $400. That was my expected budget. However once I got in I was surprised by a couple of things. 1. 30% off coupons, only works for singular purchases so limited usefulness 2. buy one get one on premium currency, 50% on everything basically. 3. 30% discounts being relatively frequently. So saving around 60% ( under the assumption you've already planned out what you are buying an set a budget expectation, it's all technically arbitrary costs and thus "savings" is a weird term to use ) is reasonably done. I don't regret it because everything I was going to get was more or less planned out and I knew I was getting myself into an unhealthy game environment. But for me the lack of a monthly fee combined with the large variety of life skills ( professions ) seemed unique enough in implementation that I deemed it unlikely that I would find another experience like it for years. For a lot of people they don't really have budgets or track how much money they're moving or estimates on how much they want to spend.
@@cattysplat I somewhat willingly allowed myself to do that once I started earning pay checks. Learn the guilt of doing so first hand and now whenever I occasionally get the urge, the feeling reminds me of what I’m actually doing and I don’t do it
Man I still remember dropping $100 on a generic bundle of currency for a mobile gacha game back in college and it made me feel so degen afterwards. There's something about being funneled into a purchase that makes you feel like you're being preyed on. Generally speaking though I don't mind microtransactions as long as they're actually micro and the game is designed to where you can actually comfortably play for free.
Any microtransactions that are pay to win or take away significant amounts of development time from other things in-game are bad for the players. That's 99% of microtransactions across all games. Even microtransactions that on paper do not seem like pay to win can often be utilized by non traditional means to achieve pay to win status (see: server transfers). The reality is the damage is already done and microtransactions aren't going anywhere.
I do not like full priced games where you pay cosmetic "options" because in time just "cosmetic options" will earn for company more money on top of your already paid full price game! When company learn that they can make a low effort "cosmetics" what will earn more money overall then they will not give a F about gameplay what you paid for with full price anymore! They will not give a F about anything else exept "cosmetics". Examples: World of Warcraft, CoD, Ubisoft Games ... when you see full priced game with cosmetics ... RUN! It's a waste of time and money.
People just can't help themselves... it's why we have laws against drugs, alcohol and gambling. The laws just haven't caught up to the digital space yet. The way MOST of these companies monetizes their games follows exactly the same principles and theories actual gambling does and they prey of the same weaknesses in people. If it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck... it probably is a duck. They keep using the defense that "it's not gambling because you can't take money out of the economy" but that's irrelevant, people prone to gambling addictions are ruining their life playing FIFA and clash of clans all the same. I don't have an issue with selling add ons to your digital product using a digital storefront... it's just that the most obscene and disgusting way of doing things have become the industry standard while lawmakers are ignorant to what the fuck is going on since they are 70 years old and need their grandchildren's help figuring out how to even use a smartphone.
@@daroaminggnome That's a pretty bad take for several reasons. 1. is that you are completely disregarding the fact that people are different and some have it harder with gambling than others because their brains are wired differently. 2. It's ultimately the society that has to pay when a member of it goes under. People that have ruined their life are more likely to need aid and they pay less taxes. Even if you don't give a fuck about number 1, number 2 should concern you.
Except most people can help themselves so your argument is idiotic. According to Project Know, with a population of 260 million adults in the U.S. we have about 13 million people who have some problem with drinking and about 8 million who have serious alcoholism. This is a problem but it hardly proves that "people just can't help themselves." Lots of people know how to use potentially addictive substances responsibly. Also, you are just flatly wrong about the laws that are on the books anyways. We don't have laws against drugs, alcohol, and gambling, we have laws restricting their usage, in most cases restricting them to people of a certain age. The rationale being that people over a certain age are more capable of making good choices. Not a perfect solution, but there is no way that we are ever going to find a perfect solution. Your solution is to throw out anything that has any risk attached to it which is not really a solution at all. We've tried narrow-minded prohibition myopia solutions before. They don't work and they actually enable worse behaviors. This is why laws against marijuana are slowly going away along with laws against sports betting and other kinds of gambling. They don't work, people hate them, they don't protect anyone, and they crimp a potential revenue stream for the state. Someone prone to a gambling addiction is probably a lot less likely to destroy their life playing video games than they are at the racetrack where they can potentially meet a bookie who can connect them to a loan shark who might later break their legs. Lawmakers are not oblivious to what is going on. They just don't care because it's an issue that really doesn't have very much of anything to do with a relevant and appropriate role for the state under our system of government. Lawmakers are bound by this thing called the Constitution. They can't just make laws simply because someone doesn't like that something happens. We're not China, not yet anyway. Also you are ignorant of why these microtransactions came about to begin with. It's called software piracy. The only way developers with limited resources could contend with it was to create this pay as you go or pay to win model because if they invested in the game up front it would just end up getting pirated. You cannot run a business if everyone is just going to steal your shit. Without these microtransactions a lot of gaming companies would not have the resources to deal with software piracy so they would simply go out of business or, if they got lucky, be bought out by a larger company. Without microtransaction every game would have to be a 50-70 dollar console or PC game that would only be released every two years if that. In other words there would be far fewer games made by far fewer companies and not necessarily of higher quality either. This can create just a much of an expense as someone forced to buy a whole console and pay 60 plus dollars per game just for the same amount of entertainment or potentially even less. Not only that but this model actually allows people to pay for exactly what they think the game is worth. Clash of Clans made 722 million in 2019 (which by the was is down considerably from its peak of 1.6 billion) divide that by an average active daily user based of 55 million and you get a whopping 13 dollars. In other words, if all of these people paid exactly the same amount the game would cost them each a measley 13 bucks a year. Of course we know that some people playing the game are paying a lot more because they choose to. This allows many other people to essentially play the game for free or essentially just at the cost of their own time. Each person gets to choose how much they value the game and experience within the game. You can pick up the game and if you don't enjoy it you can immediately put it down. Thats a hell of a lot less costly for some people that investing in a console and a 60 dollar game. If you are concerned about the economic damage to society for the handful of people who become addicted, what about the economic gain from the people who get easy and cheap access to leisure and entertainment? You are upset that games prey on the weaknesses of people but that is just life. Every single product that we use or consume is marketed to us in some way. Nothing is presented to us in a vector of pure rationality nor would even want anything to be. Ladies shaving cream tatilizes women with visions of legs like super models. Beer commercials make us dream about our old college friends at the bar. Everything uses our impulses and emotions. Yet almost every single person is capable of seeing past all this and making reasonable decisions if they so choose. Ulimately its up to individuals to understand and judge the real truth of these things for themselves even if sometimes they get things wrong. Banning shit and brining in lawmakers is just a small-minded path that leads to absolutely nowhere.
@@arandy123 You make a lot of assumptions about my opinions, you're putting words in my mouth and you're misinterpreting what i actually said. Then you go on a long ass tirade about quite frankly irrelevant stuff. I would have no issues with these games if they had an 18+ rating and a warning label on the box that said "contains gambling" but these games are more often than not marketed to everyone without any warnings. Just look at sports games and star wars battlefront for example. If your game contains gambling you should have to follow similar rules actual casinos do. I don't think this opinion is particularly controversial.
The biggest problem is that, end of the day, outside of a few indie exceptions, games are developed to make money, and the design inevitably gets warped by what makes the most profits rather than what makes the game the most fun for everybody. In the olden days of selling an entire game for a fixed price, you made more money and sold more copies by making a better, more fun game. These new MTX games make more money through psychological bullshit. Consider amusement parks that sell line-skip passes. Often I've seen these cost more than even the base general admission price. Those passes make more money the longer the lines are, as the value is all about the perception of saving time. If there were no lines, the passes would be valueless, and so the park owners need the "poors" to create these lines for them to encourage payers and give them that sense of superiority by getting walk right past people stuck in a line. The park stands to make more money by removing cars from their existing roller coasters (making the lines longer) than they would building new rides that would allow more people to have even more fun. Without peddling the line-skip passes, it'd be a no-brainer that having more, better rides and accommodating more customers at once would be the best bet for profits. With them, though, it's a perverse incentive to fuck with customers to milk them for even more money. The same goes with games.
"but you pay for the convenience of being able to play 24/7 with anyone and also you pay extra for the programmers" hur dur dur, some people would say. an online server accommodating what mtga really demand per player is less than 1$ a month, so yeah, whatever, stupid excuse, and programmers? sure at first, but now 3 years in, when maybe one or two ability really need 10 or so hours of coding, everything else is just copy and paste from the previous, if you do a "deal 1 damage to any target" and a "deal 3 damage to any target" doesnt require ANYTHING in term of coding
@@SilverPrince_ How is it odd when it is in fact gambling. And how are the skins and mounts "value", etc in other games dictated? The fact is that you are opening a case/loot box and gambling on which skin you're going to get. And Valve was the OG to do it. Shine Up.
"Predatory monetization of video games" ...or how "status symbols" entered videogames. Let's say Blizzard started selling custom order mounts that people could request being made, say through a voting page, and set the price at $250. I can almost guarantee you that over 1k people would buy it for the exclusivity and "status" it would give them, for the same reason people 'in the real world' pay 300% more for the same experience/product if it has a "special thing" about it. At the same time there could be a mount for $25, maybe 100k people would buy this mount. $25 x 100k = 250k $250 x 1000 = 250k What if Blizzard made a $500 mount? would they get 500 buyers? maybe. $1000 mount? would they get 250 buyers? possibly. All of this is the same as happens in the 'real world', people pay for exclusivity all the time. For no other reason than to be part of the 'exclusive club'. I mean, there's a reason why Spectral Tiger's go for over $8000 now. Exclusivity and limited availability, imagine if Blizzard added a mount with regional limited availability. Say $100 for a unique mount or cosmetic but only 5000 would be available in each region (NA/SA/EU/OC, Neteyes has China), that's $500k in 4 regions for Blizzard. Two million dollars that Blizzard maybe would need to put a week of development into? As a business, why would you not do this?
Contributing my 0.02$ as Belgian with a brother that's been living in the US for the past 10 years. These types of laws are much more common and easier to implement over here because of our socialist democracies. US legislation tends to get blocked because "protecting the vulnerable" always takes a back seat to "infringing on freedoms". The simplest example of this is gun control.
Work in Vegas. Can confirm the gaming floor management well radio at least one cocktail waitress or a host to babysit a whale while they gamble, they will also give them a dedicated table and dealer if that's what they want to play.
Loot boxes also directly prey upon the collectors impulse, which is a real thing and pokemon literally made their money tapping into this by having a pokedex. The difference is I dont pay 5 quid for a poke ball to open and maybe get the pokemon I need. I have bought them in the past on overwatch because I was really into certain skins that I wanted and i felt used
@@JayceCH. no, dude, they mean the literal canonical existence of the Pokedex in game, which tracks what you've collected in the game, not the out of game pokedex. The existence of the pokedex in a pokemon game is meant to get you to keep playing to collect, that's what they mean.
According to urban dictionary: "Gacha (or Gachapon) is a monetisation technique used in many successful Japanese free-to-play games. Originally a term used for Japanese Toy machines, this is used to describe games that pull a selection of data, people, heroes, etc. from a large pool at random. "
I don't think a Casino is worse, cause you walk in to a Casino knowing you walk in to a Casino. While you buy a Game to actually have fun and play a game. Not to spend money or to make money. People with Gambling addictions should not go in to Casinos and many probably know that and don't even walk in to them. While a Videogame is "its a game" they buy it and they fall in to the Gambling trap from the videogames they actually just wanted to play.
We need regulations and laws. Selling game is ok, offering multi play on servers for subscription is ok but any kind of monetization and game shop should be illegal, also paying to get advertisement free game should be ilegal. no loot boxes, no vip deals, off line playing single player game is a must not just rare option. Do not forget that now days games training millions of kids to be future addicted gamblers.
@@shcdemolisher booster packs can be a key gameplay or deckbuilding element themselves, see Booster Draft or Sealed in MTG which are highly popular formats.
@@Eaglebrace there are fundamental differences. It's my impression that TCG enthusiasts are driven by the collection aspect and are not active players. The value and validation comes from having the rarest cards and flexing over other collectors. On eBay there will be a single card sold for thousands of dollars. While Hearthstone is all about gameplay. People chase collections to be enabled to construct decks they want to play. Have you seen anyone on the internet ever boasting on having shudderlock or selling their account with it ? No. Opening packs in HS for me is the same as loot boxes is by definition - your gameplay depends heavily on it, good luck on having variety of decks to keep your gameplay fresh and fun, and When you go on a streak of opening packs full of worthless cards and finally see a legendary card screen is shacking, card is exploding while revealing, inkeeper yelling at you, you feel instant gratification and satisfaction that you might got anything useful. I wouldn't have had issues with it if wasn't such a blatant cash grab with these tedious grinds for f2p players or astronomical prices for bundles
Gacha games are lootboxes but worse cuz it combines everything that he hates about lootboxes and the things that he doesn't hate about microtransactions (i hate pay to win microtransactions but not as much as p2w lootboxes) It has pay to win with chances to not win any value (example: getting a duplicate character, weapon or skin). The gacha lootboxes have characters and cosmetics they can instead sell for a set price but they don't. The gacha lootboxes also have weapons etc making the actual game almost unplayable without the lootboxes making the "game" 80% gambling. All that is combined in the fact that lootboxes are p2w, and gambling but for kids.
Idk how anyone can play Gacha games. They're literally laughing at you in the genre of game - "HA! Gacha! Gacha to pay money that could have been infinitely more useful anywhere else."
what do you mean you are not paying for the game (wow) ? The game always cost money. When I bought it for the first time it cost money, and every expansion they released cost money. So the game it self absolutely cost money.
Everything you tolerate in Freemium games will be introduced to Premium games. Everything you tolerate in Console games will be introduced to PC games. "Slippery slope" is only a fallacy when predictive validity is low, otherwise we call it a Trend.
@@scottneil1187 In my experience, there's a lot more tolerance for terrible performance and low/capped fps among console players because those platforms have traditionally needed them to function properly. That's how you get things like game speed being tied to fps (e.g. in Fallout 76 or Toukiden: Kiwami) and 30 fps locked cutscenes (e.g. Nier Automata) on significantly stronger hardware in the ports. Those things are then absolutely shat on by the pc customer base, but the sales are still good enough to where companies don't have to give a crap. Often times thanks to the "I don't need more than 25 fps to play a game, everyone else is just whiny" crowd who will defend every single fault of these titles. Now, a game doesn't need to be a console port for these issues to happen but it really doesn't help if so many people blindly accept mediocrity.
Always-Online singleplayer-games were very much a Console thing before they were shoveled down the throats of PC users. Console gamers also allow their entire libraries to be locked behind a single first-party storefront, which is now slowly becoming the case for PC - So much so that as megacorporations like Microsoft hasten that direction, WoWcucks actually praise the action. The death of SplitScreen Hotseat Multiplayer in most games was tolerated in Consoles before it came to PC, just like the death of Local/LAN multiplayer. Everything time some shill supports something on the grounds of it being "just on phones" or "just in free games" they end up looking like an ass as, every time, they same things they allowed for free stuff ends up ruining what was supposed to be premium stuff.
I’m not gonna lie I had no issues paying for map packs in shooters or expansions to WoW but buying skins that outshine the available ones in game, xp boosts or even items that are objectively better just feels really bad.
Micro transactions and loot boxes are no different than gambling. The thrill of possibly getting something for your effort. The bells and whistles. That tiny rush of dopamine you get. It works all the same buttons in the brain as sitting at a table in a casino. Don't discount that addiction simply because it doesn't affect you or you don't understand the inability to say no.
The thing about TCGs is that they aren't as randomized as people think. Also, the trading is a really big aspect of the cards not being gambling. I do have an issue with games like Magic Arena though, because if you get 5 crappy packs of cards, you're screwed. Even hearthstone allows you to trade in cards you don't want in order to get specific cards
23:15 to add onto this, casino chips are physical objects. The animal side of our brain will still say "this object is mine" and not want to part with it, because at a basal level we recognize it as our personal possession. It's less of a block than physical money, but more than any sort of digital token. Imagine if casinos did use virtual chips on e.g. an RFID chip. I also don't hate lootboxes, because my personal policy is that I will only buy it if I am okay with any outcome of the lootbox. However, it does need to be better regulated in some way - not everyone has the same policy, and as you said gambling addicts won't evaluate them critically.
The biggest problem is that there every game tries to be a live service game now. Very few games are releasing "whole" with modding tools(for community to make extra content) and with DLC just being extra content you pay for ONE TIME that adds substantially to the game. Now every game is "live service" and "continually developed" so they can milk customers with content that in the past would have been included in one large mission pack or created by the community. The reason people were especially angry about horse armor was specifically because it signalled the end of community content(game communities have been making free customizations for games forever up to that point) and the heralding of paid dlc for every nickle and dime game companies could take you for.
I made an experiment out of myself with a certain game... You can trust me when I say, even if you try to watch yourself, dopamine acts invisibly. It is incredible how you can stumble whether to your own nature on a certain platform, or in reality to scammers. To be secure against falling the first thing you have to learn is to notice the signs with who/what you are interacting; Then you have to learn to set yourself up to win, by not playing their game.
Lootboxes aren't illegal in the Netherlands. It is only illegal if it is BOTH random and tradable. If it either isn't random (direct purchase items) or cannot be traded it isn't illegal. So games like CS:GO got into trouble, but most gatcha's are fine currently.
I can't understand logic of dumb people constantly paying. It's incredibly hard to force me to buy a game at all. First I play it for free, and then I will pay it only and if I liked the game. Or if I purchased collector's edition.
Biggest problem with gambling in video games is that I can ban myself from gambling from establishments in australia to keep myself away, but then I come home to video games and it's at home when i am trying to chill out! Lucky for me I stopped but it was a serious problem for me
Small bit regarding health insurance pricing... They doesnt charge for ensured customers the market price, is a standard price calculated on an average across all customers including non-related spences like fees, administrative staff and even eletricity bills for their HQ... Its so complex and convoluted that is almost impossible to make reason, and its intentional to be complex, because its harder to audit
28:32 and i feel like game lootboxes are worse because #1 you're basically letting kids play the slots as casinos are a tleast regulated with age restrictions going as far as even being illegal in some countries #2 The profit people are expecting still exists, just not monetary in most cases. #3 Value in microtransactions is way more obfuscated and harder to look though. especially with online payments nowadays a few bucks are spent very quickly, and do you seriously think about every single dollar you're paying for? that's the scheme behind micro transactions: a lot of small transactions to fool you into thinking "it's not that much". Most of those ganes don't even have a easily visible transaction history, so how are you going to know how much you paid except by checking your bank calculating a lot of numbers, and when are you doing that? #4 Those companies hire psychologists specifically to trick us into buying what is essentially nothing.
The price skimming actually doesn't apply to medical. A doctor can charge an insurance whatever they want but the insurance has a set fee schedule of what is allowable and they pay based on that procedure code and the fee schedule. They can charge $250 but their fee schedule is around $75 so the insurance company will only pay $75. The doctor has to write off the difference between what they billed and what the insurance allows. Price skimming doesn't work in the medical community since the 80's -- just an fyi
I agree with the point about the lack of financial responsability, that's why companies try to target teens and even kids with microtransactions they don't have that knowledge and don't understand the value of money. And for older people they are predatory towards gambling addicts, and the sad thing is a lot of gambling addicts try to find other hobbys to avoid going to a casino as a reabilitation process, just to be captured by a free to play game and even pay games with gambling mechanics even if they are only cosmetic.
The Elder Scroll's horse event perfectly shows how gamers operate, complain very vocally about something, but buy it anyway. Money speaks louder than words, nobody cares about our support, opinions and feelings, only about our money.
the other insidious trick with using alternate forms of currencies such as gems etc is they trick you to always buy uneven amounts of gem with cash purchases. say 20 bucks will get 1800 gems but an item in the store is 2000 gems or the reverse you buy something worth 1200 gems leaving 600 gems that isn't enough to buy something else so you end up spending more cash in loop and so on.
I'm fine with most micotransactions (except lootboxes, but Asmongold did a great job explaining why they are different), with one big caveat: Transparency and Loyalty. What I mean is I hate it when a game has no or only cosmetic transactions, but then suddenly the cash shop opens up and shifts the whole system. If I start playing a game the microtransaction level should stay the same.
Magic the Gathering. The next pack will definitely give you that rare you need for your deck, or some valuable chase card to sell or trade, you just need to buy more packs. At least that gives you a physical product, people are using the same mindset for pixels.
people who compare loot boxes in video games with TCGs are missing the point by a mile. With TCGs you still buy a physical product and there is a huge legal secondary market. Want a specific card? Just buy it on the secondary market, easy. The booster packs are just for people who wanna open the packs themselves and sure there's always a gambling aspect with hoping you'll get cards that are worth more than what you spent, but the point is, you have a choice. In video games you don't. You can't just buy the items outright and in the most occasions, there is no legal secondary market.
In MTG there are also formats like Sealed or Draft which only function because of booster packs. They require highly different strategies compared to constructed formats like Standard or Modern.
@Urazz exactly. Hasbro can stop printing new cards, won't make me lose the ones I already have, won't make my friends lose theirs, we will always be able to play with the decks we posess. We don't depend on a third party to host our product indefinitely
27:00 when asmongold got to this point, I feel he fucked up hard. The point the F2P model wants to point you towards is not seeing the 100 pulls at 2$ a piece. Financially responsible is easy to throw around, but would asmongold say he hasn’t dropped 200$ on things that are not “finally responsible” as well?
yeah i also don't think those people should be blamed, it's the failure of the education system and most of all are those abusive companies to blame. Saying "people falling for micro transactions are morons" is like saying "people getting scammed are idiots", "if the kid gets eaten by a lion it's the kids fault" basically a survival of the fittest mindset. It's just very egoistical to think like that but that's generally the biggest problem our society is facing rn.
As a amateur indie game developer I avoid this new greedy toxic culture at all cost. My game means the world to me, I would never ruin any of it by in-game purchases or other addictive gambling crap just to earn more money. I much rather sell poorly than to be a sellout.
Another part of this is the complicity of the ESRB and other game rating companies who could at least alter the ratings to games with gatcha and loot boxes to an M or NC-17 rating because it's literally gambling. The fact they choose not to while having a 'Tools for Parents' on their website is fucking evil. These things are all gambling 100%. It should be totally illegal, or rating systems should change as an absolute bare minimum, that's for damn sure.
I completely agree. Sadly it’ll take an industry rebuild and the powers of law that be need a massive update or Atleast be heavily informed of what this is. Thankfully as we saw in Europe, they made sure such things like that can’t happen in games. Over here in the US? Not likely unless it’s an action from all 50 states to every game maker and publisher in the world.
250 for a simple doctor's visit? Holy crap. And people are still against general health care?! Here in Belgium we pay amongst the highest amount of taxes in the world (sometimes even the most) but a general GP visit costs about 28euro, of which I get refunded 22...
Fun Fact, or not so fun: your copay (what you pay) for medicaments from the pharmacy can be higher than when you just pay for the whole cost of medicaments yourself. If you ask them, the pharmacy has to disclose how much it would cost you to buy the meds outrigt and howmuch the copay would be. They are contratly obligated to ONLY disclose this IF you ask them, otherwise they HAVE to charge you the copay, even if the copay is much higher... There was a vid, but i dont remember from who this was, where this pracise is shown.
As a Korean I've heard Wallstreet level derivatives in NC soft games(Lineage series).... You western guys might not understand how could multi millions of dollars be paid in video game. 'So what sword has price of $1M?' No, no..., buddy. There is a stack of system. At the lowest level there is consumables literally works like an respiratory to gain experience points 'as other people gets'. Without it you cannot get loots practically and only achieve tiny portion of golds. And above it there is multiple item reforging / fusioning systems, requires multi stages of reforging / fusioning. Of course as your item reaches higher it costs more and have more chances to fail, and if it fails it downgrades or disappears to ash. Chances could go down to multiple fraction of a single percent. And there is collectables.Various collection sets give player a little bits of advantages. Because they are competative games, whales compete with other whales, killed by other whales, humilated by other whales - so they races to maximum. Of course collectables are multi-staged and has success/failure ratio of each stages. They could be items, discoveries, lootbox picks, achievements etc. Each primitive trials requires 'gems' converted from real world cash, but after that its all complex financial system is fueled with gem based metaeconomy (of course there is multiple required types of 'gems' preventing direct exchange from $$$). Collections of 100 things could be fabricated with 70 of 40% items, 20 of 10% items, 5 of 1% items, 3 of 0.1% items, 2 of 0.01% items. Of course people having 98/100 collection will eager to pay more, right? This example is pretty naive because there is many things below 0.0001% out there - for example "Crafting recipe for Legendary weapon carving, consumable" in Lineage Mobile has 0.00001% chance of loot from specific crate. Oh, and of course the crate cannot be bought individually, it only can be bought as a package with other thingies. I think game monetization is becoming like financial engineering. As most people do not care much about complexity of Wallstreet's black magic, Most people do not play that crazy games and pay that much. but there is certainly an abyss of details between 'this game has P2W' and 'this is NCsoft game'.
a good one to look at is how rocket league removed loot boxes and replaced it with direct sales and got a bunch of backlash because people enjoyed it and they had to publicly show how much more money people were spending to get items. or the cost to get a rare via loot boxes compared to paying for it, was like 5-10x
My opion on lootboxes: if you are getting whatever you know is guarenteed like the "giga ultra staff" but get bonuses along with it I believe that's fine. Whats not fine is putting a timer or the more you progressively buy the higher chance you have getting that item or even buying until you get a 100% guarantee is dum. You should be paying and knowing what you're getting and not spending money for a dumb outcome of a few stickers. I personally am not the smartest for falling into this trap when I was a teenager buying rare crates in COD black ops 3 that increase the chance of me getting a classified weapon.
I have to respectfully disagree on the loot boxes. I think it should be perfectly legal and regulated the same as a real money slot machine. You want loot boxes, fine, but your game is automatically AO and you have to deal with every states gaming commission.
As a software developer this feels like an advertisement that I should make a small group of 5-10 people to create a puzzle rpg mobile game with loot boxes and gambling mechanics. Now I just need 1-2 artists/animators, 1 sound designer, and a couple more developers and we'll be making a million a month each easy enough. And then quit our real jobs and work on a real passion project while giving some minimal support to the mobile game.
What if wow put in a weekly random reward with one drop for pve and one drop for pvp and it gave the player a chance of getting a cash shop item for free? Strictly in game currency from playing the game and you can get gold, rep items, crafting materials or if you're lucky, a cash shop item. It'd remove a lot of stigma surrounding ppl who have these items and give people a pretty good reason to log on every week. It would also be a pretty good PR move.
the main thing i despise about microtransactions is games that are advertised as free to play but itturns out many areas in the game are locked behind a paywall. wizard 101 for example was bs last time i played it lets you accept the quests for premium areas and the poor kid that just wants to have fun beinga witch or wizard gets hit with a stupid pop up feels lied to then leaves the game because they know thier parents wont let them have the cash needed to acess the rest of the game,paywalls that are sneaked in like this are especially evil if its in a kids game im almost mad enough to make a petition to get that shit regulated.
2 ปีที่แล้ว +14
Let's all agree that whenever asmonGold uploads our days get so much better ❤️
There's a surprising amount of stuff where 'well the system takes advantage of them but they should know better' is used to reduce pressure on the people who benefit from abusing idiots. Idiots will never go away and an idiots money might be better spent on legitimate exchange instead of infinite mtx greed for digital power.
i mean technically people shouldnt really blame Idiots for being idiots just because the education system failed, they should blame the education system.
25:30 not always the case. I spent a lot of money 5 years ago on some random game not because i was stupid but because i was in a vulnerable spot. I was going through a particularly rough patch at the time that caused me enought stress to where it affected me physically. This also caused me to spend money just to feel good. I knew it wasn't okay but i still did it. Once life got better i came around and dropped that game. I still regret spending all that money.
glad someone else noticed this! because as well you have people with things like ADHD where Impulse control is something they really suffer with! and its not because they're 'Morons' its because they probably dont have or cant get systems to help them.
I'm only okay with cosmetic microtransactions in a full priced game if: 1. They are up front to me about implementing it to the game. 2. That it doesn't get implemented on DAY ONE! Because then they cut content out of the game in order to sell me it seperately. Also, cosmetic microtransactions can ruin peoples experience of the game. I loved playing Siege A LOT back in the day, but the moment they implemented unicorn helmets to the operators i couldn't take the game seriously anymore, and i haven't logged on the game since. Ready or Not is more like the experience i wanted for Siege, but they took the money route.
TES wasnt the first DLC kinda. Halo 2 had an expansion that were bought as a CD, the multilpayer pack, it was 2005. Also glad that Price Skimming is forbidden in my country at all. Imagine living in the US.
Umm I was kinda laughing at 32:00 because Asmon had no clue what "gacha" games are or meant and he says "I'm not talking about that." :D Gacha = You have a lootbox where you have a chance (gambling) of pulling the ultra rare (0.1% chance) mega superweapon, which is EXACTLY what he was talking about. The only difference between a lootbox and a gacha is that gacha isn't presented to be in a box.
I really like how Blizzard does loot boxes tbh kinda as you mentioned it is available to buy outright anyway but also you can get it through in-game currency/achievement (like leveling up on overwatch/HOTS).
The best games are the ones where you pay once for the main game, and later on delivers free dlc content. It's ok to pay for dlc's for a lower price than what the main game costs. The Witcher 3.
When store mounts came up with continual development. Here's how I think asmon would cut it. GW2, pay to enter. Store mounts = fine Wow/ff14, subscription. Store mounts = no go
One correction, Asmon is incorrect when he says that hospitals bill insurance for more and the uninsured for less. It is actually the other way around. Uninsured people are actually charged far more than insured people; often being charged the maximum amount for any service. This makes sense because the whole idea behind private insurance is that they are able to negotiate for lower prices in exchange for offering their pool of potential patients. This is why insurance companies have "in network" and "out of network" price differences because they have negotiated a lower price with that particular health group. Moreover, when you look at your hospital bill, the amount that is quoted as "billed to insurance" is not what the insurance company actually pays. The amount is usually far lower. The reason the actual payment is not shown is because neither the hospital, nor the insurance company want the real cost shown. The insurance company benefits because their client pool believes they are getting a better deal than they actually are. Healthcare providers do not want to tip their hand on what the real negotiated price is because it puts them in a worse bargain position when they have to deal with other insurance companies; not to mention disgruntled uninsured patients who will balk at the large price discrepancy. I cant say for sure why Asmon has a lower uninsured bill. For starters, the ACA should have allowed Asmon to stay on his fathers insurance up until the age of 26, assuming Asmons father was still working at the time. There could have been some form of government assistance if it was his mother's bills through something like Medicare/Medicaid/Federal Disability. Usually those agencies are billed first, and then you receive the bill for your portion. Often it is not reflected how much these agencies have paid, as it is up to the healthcare agency to disclose the amount that the government has paid. This information is obtainable, but you have to go looking for it. Even if we are talking about Asmon specifically, there could be other reasons why the bill was lower, as just about every healthcare facility does things a little differently. However, in broad strokes, the uninsured still pay the highest amount out of pocket compared to the insured. If you want to read a good article concerning how hospitals price their services, I recommend looking up an article called "Bitter Pill" from Times Magazine. It is about 9 years old, but he central point still hold just as true today as it did then.
I am no living in States, but in Australia, if you didn’t have private health insurance, you can either find services charged you more or less. It all depends on different service providers. It’s also happened when you have full car insurance, your panel beater will charge few thousands dollar to insurance company, however if you didn’t have insurance for your car, they usually charge few hundreds dollars to you.
Goddamn asmon was on point here while taking no bs from chat, love him for that. Btw i love running around in default skins while being at the top of the leaderbord, and then after the match getting messages about me being a cheater!
WoW Ascension is pretty cool because it's free to play and you can buy the donation points with gold in the game... but of course it's bought from others who either bought it with gold, or actual money.
I think casinos are worse too... In ISOLATION. But you can't do it everywhere, and when you do you at least have a surface level expectation that it is "regulated". Anyone can download a free game, so the damage is bigger, and the profit margins bigger still. ... Aren't gacha games essentially lootboxes anyway?
the funiest shit about "MICROtransactions" to me is the fact that they usually go up to $99 on mobile games ... so basicly more expensive than a full AAA game ... how is that a "MICROtransaction" ? it's a full on transaction ...
The Full content of a Hearthstone expansion costs about 400-600 dollars. Of you wanted to not spend any money, you would have to play 10 hours a day… for half a year.
Check out other videos from How Money Works to learn how money works.
th-cam.com/channels/kCGANrihzExmu9QiqZpPlQ.html
Asmond I wanna explain to you real quick about why I disagree with what you said about spending money on a game. Using your own words it’s designed as a smoke screen to make it harder to know what you paid for. So it’s not 100% the person spending money in that situation. I believe they are victims because the company put them into that situation. Let me explain with an example: I know that there is a hiking trial that’s very popular and well traveled. So I decide to put bear traps along it for fun. Now if someone gets caught in the bear trap is it their fault? I just feel like you’re participating in a bit of victim blaming. Also the analogy of the person partying every weekend doesn’t really line up because they aren’t paying for arbitrary tokens and gems designed to obfuscate the actual price tags of the drinks or food. I just trying to give you genuine criticism because I love you content but i just felt that what you said was (and I mean this the nicest way) kinda irresponsible. Because it encourages victim blaming and letting these disgusting companies off the hook.
@@thebattlemageXD could you blame the first guy who hit your bear trap? No. How many people later would you start wondering if we should stop talking about victim blaming? If 10,000 people walked into your bear traps that you kept laying, at some point it becomes a different conversation. I'm trying to imagine if you financially profited off of laying bear traps and for some unfathomable reason the authorities did nothing. With your permission I'd like to regularly use this analogy in conversations in the future as I think it's humorous to think through and analyze. Enjoy your day.
How also about a limit on how many new stuff appears in a cash shop in a week... like right now, per week, there's thousands in value in rotating cash shop items playing on fomo in most games with microtransactions... in my mind, thats no good either. lets put 100$ limit in how much someone can pay to get everything per week, the game can still make 400 per month to the heavy players, but at least, the damage due to fomo is mitigated... right now, its just pure chaos.
Oh youre such a good boy.! We love you !
I like when everything in the store cost x + 20 and the smallest amount you can buy is x. So something costs 120 but you have to buy 200 tokens to buy it.
Just like the conveniently 25.98 EUR priced 2-month prepaid game time. It’s to avoid people putting a 25€ card and instead having to shell out 35.
@@Donovarkhallum also sales tax.
I always hated that especially because usually you can’t cash out or like buy something with your remainder(like zeroing out)
@@Donovarkhallum Activation fees on cards? Nah, it's just a piece of paper with a code on it that you enter in battle net ^^.
And some people don't have access to a credit card, it's not the US paystyle all over the world. Prepaid is for some, the only way of actually paying for the game (going to a store, buying the code and putting it into bnet).
And even if blizzard has to pay retailers for the prepaid cards, it's just bad optics to put 98 cents on top of the price, make it 30 or 25, not 25.98, it's shit (dishonest) practice.
Ahhhh yes, the Microsoft XBL "experience".
2:03 Just wanted to point out that while 'Horse Armor' is the ninth best selling dlc for Oblivion, there were only 10 dlc for said game... It only beat out the 'Fighter's Stronghold' which according to Bethesda, would have placed higher than the 'Horse Armor' if they included promotions and freebies. Thus making 'Horse Armor' technically the tenth best selling dlc for Oblivion... out of ten.
Still, a 1 000 000% profit is still worth it when all the costs you had making it was a few hours of work of a single dev.
That's what other companies saw.
Massive profit margins with the bare minimum of investment.
@@andregon4366 Yeah, that wasn't the relevant metric to bring up about horse armor. The relevant metric was the metric money pile that was the return on investment. The artist(s) + a dev spent about a day apiece to make that armor and implement it. Even if we assume that all of the people involved were paid SUPER well, you are still looking at a ROI that only needs like 1500-2000 players to buy it and break even.
Extrapolate that to the current model where you are seeing Valorant selling knife skins directly to player for $30-50+(or in the bundles that quickly reach $100+) and you see investors looking at a week's worth of work on the studio floor equaling the same price point as full fledged games that take 5+ years of dev time. It is no wonder that so many games are being drip fed and kept alive, just to skim the MTX whales that don't care about getting a new game.
I think a lot of people were more fine with "MICROtransactions" if they were actually "micro".
0.10ct for a skin
0.20ct for an emote
0.50ct for a mount
I think that just devalues all the items in the game. Sure, you'd save people from being accountable to wasting money, but it's totally ineffective if they just move to a game that has some sense of reward/achievement for earning/buying items.
true. im surprised that blizzard still has the wow boost going for 60$ even after the level squish. when the number was higher it made more sense (but still expensive), because people dont wanna take the time, but leveling is so fast now.
Micro transactions originally referred to items that cost less than like 5 bucks in a shop. Now it's just a la cart.
@@jacobbaartz7710
You're not achieving anything by buying anything or playing a video game for that matter.
The entire system is based around giving you a false sense of accomplishment for sitting on your ass doing nothing.
@@martyfromnebraska1045 Oh dude, it's been 2 yrs. My position doesn't even reflect this.
Now it's probably gonna be more along the lines of "if you have purchases this cheap, nobody will engage with the game, because comparatively purchases far outweigh in game progression".
That's not excusing p2w in any way, I completely avoid anything p2w these days.
I was a Genshin Impact player. I spend a significant amount of money without putting myself in trouble to get what I wanted. It was legitimately the hardest thing to just sotp playing. Because at one point I was tired of the game, nothing was fun but I kept playing just because of FOMO and to validate my thousand of hours and money into the game. Fortunately, I stopped. I don't plan on coming back. I got better things to do.
I bailed on the 2nd month of Genshin.
@@Rihardololz What does it have to do with people being "weak minded", if they fell prey to a predatory system?
Genshin knows that they have to connect the new character emotionally for the player to tip them into "gotta try my luck". More over Genshin provides a pity system with a 50% chance of not getting the rate up hero (with the first pity). Thus encouraging said player to spend just enough to reach these pity points. If he is unlucky and does not get the character, they might be inclined to go further for the guaranteed pity roll, since they already started spending to make the investment "worthwhile".
I think it's importent to be aware of predatory designs of games. People should know what they are getting into. Obfuscating money and currency is a design choice of the game to make it easier to lure people into those spending habbits. Therefore the game IS to blame for not clearifying their spending systems.
Asmon made a really good point. The game often starts selling stuff cheap "just like drug dealers"...
welp i feel a bit bad that u missed one of the few best story events in game where multiple beloved characters actually meet up
@@Rihardololz no its not weak minded the guy just quit coz there are nothing else to do than plain grinding hell i am a f2p i need to agree that grinding is boring af like it gets too repetative just to build 1-5 characters
@@Rihardololz What a ... uhm, "weak mindset" of you. I think the way you try to "blame" people is just a "weak mindset" way to "defend" a "game fault". If they doesn't like the game, the game is not for them, or describe better, the game IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH to keep its players. That's it, try to accept it, dear "weak mindset"
2:18 this is the part that so many people miss about the MTX/F2P BS we have today: the VAST majority of gamers bought that stuff. For YEARS. No matter how 'silly' it was.
Now look at us. TWENTY DOLLARS FOR BLUE?!
GLOSSY FUCKING BLUE?!?!??!
As a person working in the legislative branch, no one is banning these sort of business practices any time soon, no matter how younger Congress gets. They have no interests in going against their lobbyists. With these recent Microsoft’s acquisitions, just forget about it. States have to make this an issue, not Congress.
governors needs money to their campaign too, this will not happen
TH-cam gaming channels seem to not talk about how great games are anymore, but rather what's just fucking them up. The kind of thing us "tin-foil hat alt-rights" warned about a long time ago.
@@sik3xploit they never listened
@@thewildcardperson When do people ever?
@@lobsterrj at a certain point there will be too pay people to pay off. thats why focusing on local pressure to ban is the best. ideally the pressure created by consumers wipes out the profit from the shady business practice. like you wont make your local politician not corrupt, but you will remind them to put their hand out, which makes the publishers think twice about engaging in the shady tactic
Ive said this for a while now. We need another video game crash just like the E.T for Atari in the 80s. It's way out of hand. Changes will maybe be made when politicians kid fall ill to this crap
Atari already made nfts so I think it's bound to happen
@@midnightowl8692 Say you aren't kidding
we did already in 2008, if its going to happen again then it'll take something big happening to the economy again
@@triplehelix3207 it did?
@@triplehelix3207 what was it about?
No one really clarified that lootboxes and Gacha are the same thing just without the box.
Issue with monetization practices is that devs think "how do we fit that into the game" instead of "how fitting it into the game will affect the game". Hence, we end up with clown costumes and anime mounts. While stuff like that doesn't exactly ruin the game, it sure waves immersion goodbye. But who cares about immersion in "virtual worlds", amirite?
Well I'd say, it depends. The games where those types of cosmetics are most prevalent aren't "realistic" games, and most of the time they're multiplayer games that are fun/competition first. Obviously this argument doesn't work for everything, there should never be a bright pink skin in something like Tarkov (for immersion because it's actually a key part of the game) or a historical game (for respect of the history). But when it comes down to it, I don't feel immersion is about realism or being grounded in real-ish rules, I think it's just all about being convincing enough that no matter what you put in front of the consumer, they'll accept it. And even then, Immersion isn't everything. The vast majority of people don't buy Battlefield or play Valorant to be immersed, they're there to have fun (the simple and/or gameplay focused kind).
I just feel like what a dev puts up on sale should always be for what the game represents. If it's fun first, then go wild, but if immersion is apart of that fun, then restrain yourself.
I wouldn't say immersion because some things fit, id say its disheartening. Why even bother going for cooler harder vanity items when you can just by them out right.🤷♂️
edit
Defintely some that SHATTER immersion. For example, remember dead space or even Halo cat ears is a big one.
@@TacticalReaper56 for a free game I think it's okay. The subjective feeling of accomplishment I think is easily overtaken by good live service games for everyone. And it's not like both can't exist together.
The problem is that you assume game companies care about their games. They don't. They care about their profit margin. That's it. They will happily tank their game and throw lasers and spaceships in a medieval setting if it'll make them more money.
And if it truly tanks their game to the point they have to shut down the servers? Well you know what? That's fantastic! Don't have to keep paying for hosting! Oh and by the way, here's this other game we've been developing .. you know, just in case you're looking for a "new experience".
Lootboxes are illegal here in Belgium, also in the Netherlands. This is the reason why Lost Ark won't launch here and in the Netherlands, even though all other games that have lootboxes do, they just modify or disable them. draw your own conclusions from that if they won't even do that and prefer to not launch here at all...
well its an mmo so they really can't change anything because they would have to for everyone else not just that region. And it's not big enough a market to justify making a standalone version for it.
The biggest issue with outlawing loot boxes is the case of TCGs. Opening card packs is basically equivalent to opening loot boxes and TCGs have been around for ages in both physical and online forms(MTG online is very old by now, as are other TCG platforms). While loot boxes are slightly different from card packs in TCGs, since there are many forms of loot boxes some are closer to card packs than others which makes it very difficult to make a legal distinction between them. Also there's the whole issue of freedoms, both in terms of individual freedoms to spend money how they wish and for companies to make a living how they choose. Whether it's gambling or not may be obvious to us "veteran gamers" however it's not nearly as obvious in the eyes of the law since lawmakers are as usual very antiquated.
Its interesting you mention the separation of the value through in game currency because I often find myself making the conversions in my head and coming to the conclusion that its not worth it.
Where are these bots coming from? There's so many of this exact message, and they're being upvoted, why?
With systems like wow token (I do not play wow) you can give a real money value to everything in the game. I have not put my real life money in like that but it is crazy how I can do the math in my head and calculate a real life money amount for what I just achieved in the game.
I have calculated that I can make 2,5€/h as an example just by playing the game and getting the in game money and that my character equipments are worth 180€+160€+3x15€ etc.
Talk about breaking the immersion.
Asmon's a little off the mark here. He's correct that its to separate value, but that's not the original or most important purpose of tokenizing money. The original and main purpose of tokenizing money is to be region agnostic. They can charge an American USD10 for 100 tokens, while charging an Indian INR4000 (~USD53) and a Chinese person CNY300 (~USD47).
Now you might think the benefit of doing it that way is to allow them to predatorily price things according to the wealth of each region. But that's not true. They could (and did) do that anyway before tokenization became commonplace.
The real benefit is more technical: It allows the game servers to not know or care about real world currencies, exchange rates, local tax codes, etc. Each regional office can setup their own store page and price things based on local knowledge, and then that all gets aggregated through the use of a single in-game currency. The only currency the game servers need to actually know or care about is the one they've invented.
It simplifies things greatly from a design and programming perspective. It simplifies things greatly from a marketing perspective. That includes external marketing such as streamers and social media creators. For example if Asmon complains about something costing $10, that doesn't really mean anything to anyone outside the US. Not only do they have to do the currency conversions but the pricing in their region might not even be the same. On the other hand if Asmon complains about it costing 100 tokens though, everyone on the planet who plays the game will have at least an understanding of how much that thing is worth to them.
Certainly, some companies find ways to abuse these systems. There is the issue Asmon brought up with games having so many inter-related currencies that you need a PhD in math to figure out how much you're actually spending on anything. There is the issue I've seen in other posts where the company will charge 120 tokens for everything but only sell tokens in bundles of 100 (forcing you to over-purchase unless you happen to have just the right amount leftover from the last over-purchase to cover the difference). I'm sure there are others. And certainly such systems are frustrating to deal with, but even if we were to somehow get rid of all that shadiness via regulation or divine intervention, having tokenized currency would still be widely utilized because its highly beneficial to the companies for completely practical, not-shady reasons.
i master the arts of reading how fucking expensive in game currency is basically if its 500 gems for the item the clocest cost to buy in shop will be either 120gems 240gems 350gems and 700gems rough estimate
Growing up in Las Vegas we had a saying...Billion dollar hotels aren't built off winners.
The thing that bothers me most about Loot Boxes, is that they aren't time-gated, especially on MMO's when everything is time-gated
You can time-gate certain loot box prizes in order to pressure payers into forgoing their better judgement and making the purchase out of fear of missing out on something they might want. Thinking is the enemy of the sale, so making payers feel like they'll miss out if they take too long to think about it is key.
my problem with the f2p models is the lack of reinvestment into the game..... most of it is just pocketed, or invested into "next game"
The reason I'm against paid games with cosmetic microtransactions is because the default cosmetics in the game are made shit on purpose to make you pay for the good stuff.
Fortnite is a prime example for this.
I remember a time where I spent over a few hundred dollars on a mobile game in my early collage years. I eventually realised how stupid it was and stopped playing it and am being far more careful with the amount I spend, since I don't get all that much and all of that jazz. So I understood and agree with asmons point on the whole "accidently spend 200 dollars point". You don't "accidentely" spend 200 dollars, you CHOSE to spend 200 dollars which backfired really hard.
it's more like you CHOSE to spend 200 dollars under the influence of myriad of psychological manipulation tactics carefully designed by experts to extract the most money out of you possible. Most people who press download a free game on the app store do not know what they're actually walking into (which they should)
I mean I choose to spend $200 in black desert online. I downloaded the game expecting to spend $400. That was my expected budget. However once I got in I was surprised by a couple of things. 1. 30% off coupons, only works for singular purchases so limited usefulness 2. buy one get one on premium currency, 50% on everything basically. 3. 30% discounts being relatively frequently. So saving around 60% ( under the assumption you've already planned out what you are buying an set a budget expectation, it's all technically arbitrary costs and thus "savings" is a weird term to use ) is reasonably done.
I don't regret it because everything I was going to get was more or less planned out and I knew I was getting myself into an unhealthy game environment.
But for me the lack of a monthly fee combined with the large variety of life skills ( professions ) seemed unique enough in implementation that I deemed it unlikely that I would find another experience like it for years.
For a lot of people they don't really have budgets or track how much money they're moving or estimates on how much they want to spend.
@@cattysplat I somewhat willingly allowed myself to do that once I started earning pay checks. Learn the guilt of doing so first hand and now whenever I occasionally get the urge, the feeling reminds me of what I’m actually doing and I don’t do it
also its rarely 200 dollar in one go,its couple of dollar here and it accumulate over time
Man I still remember dropping $100 on a generic bundle of currency for a mobile gacha game back in college and it made me feel so degen afterwards. There's something about being funneled into a purchase that makes you feel like you're being preyed on. Generally speaking though I don't mind microtransactions as long as they're actually micro and the game is designed to where you can actually comfortably play for free.
Any microtransactions that are pay to win or take away significant amounts of development time from other things in-game are bad for the players. That's 99% of microtransactions across all games. Even microtransactions that on paper do not seem like pay to win can often be utilized by non traditional means to achieve pay to win status (see: server transfers). The reality is the damage is already done and microtransactions aren't going anywhere.
Catdany and daily dose doing gods work with these uploads, love ya bois
The editing is perfect, these people know whats up
ball garglers
This is old news, Extra Creditz covered micro-transactions, Skinner Box techniques etc, a decade ago.
I do not like full priced games where you pay cosmetic "options" because in time just "cosmetic options" will earn for company more money on top of your already paid full price game!
When company learn that they can make a low effort "cosmetics" what will earn more money overall then they will not give a F about gameplay what you paid for with full price anymore!
They will not give a F about anything else exept "cosmetics". Examples: World of Warcraft, CoD, Ubisoft Games ... when you see full priced game with cosmetics ... RUN! It's a waste of time and money.
People just can't help themselves... it's why we have laws against drugs, alcohol and gambling. The laws just haven't caught up to the digital space yet. The way MOST of these companies monetizes their games follows exactly the same principles and theories actual gambling does and they prey of the same weaknesses in people. If it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck... it probably is a duck. They keep using the defense that "it's not gambling because you can't take money out of the economy" but that's irrelevant, people prone to gambling addictions are ruining their life playing FIFA and clash of clans all the same.
I don't have an issue with selling add ons to your digital product using a digital storefront... it's just that the most obscene and disgusting way of doing things have become the industry standard while lawmakers are ignorant to what the fuck is going on since they are 70 years old and need their grandchildren's help figuring out how to even use a smartphone.
@@daroaminggnome That's a pretty bad take for several reasons.
1. is that you are completely disregarding the fact that people are different and some have it harder with gambling than others because their brains are wired differently.
2. It's ultimately the society that has to pay when a member of it goes under. People that have ruined their life are more likely to need aid and they pay less taxes.
Even if you don't give a fuck about number 1, number 2 should concern you.
Except most people can help themselves so your argument is idiotic. According to Project Know, with a population of 260 million adults in the U.S. we have about 13 million people who have some problem with drinking and about 8 million who have serious alcoholism. This is a problem but it hardly proves that "people just can't help themselves." Lots of people know how to use potentially addictive substances responsibly. Also, you are just flatly wrong about the laws that are on the books anyways. We don't have laws against drugs, alcohol, and gambling, we have laws restricting their usage, in most cases restricting them to people of a certain age. The rationale being that people over a certain age are more capable of making good choices. Not a perfect solution, but there is no way that we are ever going to find a perfect solution. Your solution is to throw out anything that has any risk attached to it which is not really a solution at all. We've tried narrow-minded prohibition myopia solutions before. They don't work and they actually enable worse behaviors. This is why laws against marijuana are slowly going away along with laws against sports betting and other kinds of gambling. They don't work, people hate them, they don't protect anyone, and they crimp a potential revenue stream for the state.
Someone prone to a gambling addiction is probably a lot less likely to destroy their life playing video games than they are at the racetrack where they can potentially meet a bookie who can connect them to a loan shark who might later break their legs.
Lawmakers are not oblivious to what is going on. They just don't care because it's an issue that really doesn't have very much of anything to do with a relevant and appropriate role for the state under our system of government. Lawmakers are bound by this thing called the Constitution. They can't just make laws simply because someone doesn't like that something happens. We're not China, not yet anyway.
Also you are ignorant of why these microtransactions came about to begin with. It's called software piracy. The only way developers with limited resources could contend with it was to create this pay as you go or pay to win model because if they invested in the game up front it would just end up getting pirated. You cannot run a business if everyone is just going to steal your shit. Without these microtransactions a lot of gaming companies would not have the resources to deal with software piracy so they would simply go out of business or, if they got lucky, be bought out by a larger company. Without microtransaction every game would have to be a 50-70 dollar console or PC game that would only be released every two years if that. In other words there would be far fewer games made by far fewer companies and not necessarily of higher quality either. This can create just a much of an expense as someone forced to buy a whole console and pay 60 plus dollars per game just for the same amount of entertainment or potentially even less.
Not only that but this model actually allows people to pay for exactly what they think the game is worth. Clash of Clans made 722 million in 2019 (which by the was is down considerably from its peak of 1.6 billion) divide that by an average active daily user based of 55 million and you get a whopping 13 dollars. In other words, if all of these people paid exactly the same amount the game would cost them each a measley 13 bucks a year. Of course we know that some people playing the game are paying a lot more because they choose to. This allows many other people to essentially play the game for free or essentially just at the cost of their own time. Each person gets to choose how much they value the game and experience within the game. You can pick up the game and if you don't enjoy it you can immediately put it down. Thats a hell of a lot less costly for some people that investing in a console and a 60 dollar game. If you are concerned about the economic damage to society for the handful of people who become addicted, what about the economic gain from the people who get easy and cheap access to leisure and entertainment?
You are upset that games prey on the weaknesses of people but that is just life. Every single product that we use or consume is marketed to us in some way. Nothing is presented to us in a vector of pure rationality nor would even want anything to be. Ladies shaving cream tatilizes women with visions of legs like super models. Beer commercials make us dream about our old college friends at the bar. Everything uses our impulses and emotions. Yet almost every single person is capable of seeing past all this and making reasonable decisions if they so choose. Ulimately its up to individuals to understand and judge the real truth of these things for themselves even if sometimes they get things wrong. Banning shit and brining in lawmakers is just a small-minded path that leads to absolutely nowhere.
@@arandy123 You make a lot of assumptions about my opinions, you're putting words in my mouth and you're misinterpreting what i actually said. Then you go on a long ass tirade about quite frankly irrelevant stuff.
I would have no issues with these games if they had an 18+ rating and a warning label on the box that said "contains gambling" but these games are more often than not marketed to everyone without any warnings. Just look at sports games and star wars battlefront for example.
If your game contains gambling you should have to follow similar rules actual casinos do. I don't think this opinion is particularly controversial.
The biggest problem is that, end of the day, outside of a few indie exceptions, games are developed to make money, and the design inevitably gets warped by what makes the most profits rather than what makes the game the most fun for everybody. In the olden days of selling an entire game for a fixed price, you made more money and sold more copies by making a better, more fun game. These new MTX games make more money through psychological bullshit.
Consider amusement parks that sell line-skip passes. Often I've seen these cost more than even the base general admission price. Those passes make more money the longer the lines are, as the value is all about the perception of saving time. If there were no lines, the passes would be valueless, and so the park owners need the "poors" to create these lines for them to encourage payers and give them that sense of superiority by getting walk right past people stuck in a line. The park stands to make more money by removing cars from their existing roller coasters (making the lines longer) than they would building new rides that would allow more people to have even more fun. Without peddling the line-skip passes, it'd be a no-brainer that having more, better rides and accommodating more customers at once would be the best bet for profits. With them, though, it's a perverse incentive to fuck with customers to milk them for even more money. The same goes with games.
"but you pay for the convenience of being able to play 24/7 with anyone and also you pay extra for the programmers" hur dur dur, some people would say.
an online server accommodating what mtga really demand per player is less than 1$ a month, so yeah, whatever, stupid excuse, and programmers? sure at first, but now 3 years in, when maybe one or two ability really need 10 or so hours of coding, everything else is just copy and paste from the previous, if you do a "deal 1 damage to any target" and a "deal 3 damage to any target" doesnt require ANYTHING in term of coding
You can thank VALVE and CSGO for the OG lootbox/gambling shitshow. Thats what got all this shit started!
That's an odd example since the Case system is cosmetic only, and is driven by percieved value in the Market.
Do you really think if they didn't, no one else would of?
@@SilverPrince_ How is it odd when it is in fact gambling. And how are the skins and mounts "value", etc in other games dictated? The fact is that you are opening a case/loot box and gambling on which skin you're going to get. And Valve was the OG to do it. Shine Up.
EA and Fifa Ultimate Team, not Valve and CSGO
@@BrianEdwardAshmore they started it, but CS:GO was the one that massively popularized it
25:00 Asmon doesn't know what Impulse Buying or Spending Addiction is
"Predatory monetization of video games"
...or how "status symbols" entered videogames.
Let's say Blizzard started selling custom order mounts that people could request being made, say through a voting page, and set the price at $250. I can almost guarantee you that over 1k people would buy it for the exclusivity and "status" it would give them, for the same reason people 'in the real world' pay 300% more for the same experience/product if it has a "special thing" about it.
At the same time there could be a mount for $25, maybe 100k people would buy this mount.
$25 x 100k = 250k
$250 x 1000 = 250k
What if Blizzard made a $500 mount? would they get 500 buyers? maybe.
$1000 mount? would they get 250 buyers? possibly.
All of this is the same as happens in the 'real world', people pay for exclusivity all the time. For no other reason than to be part of the 'exclusive club'.
I mean, there's a reason why Spectral Tiger's go for over $8000 now. Exclusivity and limited availability, imagine if Blizzard added a mount with regional limited availability. Say $100 for a unique mount or cosmetic but only 5000 would be available in each region (NA/SA/EU/OC, Neteyes has China), that's $500k in 4 regions for Blizzard. Two million dollars that Blizzard maybe would need to put a week of development into? As a business, why would you not do this?
now lets make them auto generated because they are still "unique" and you got some NFTs 🙄🤪🤣🙃
Contributing my 0.02$ as Belgian with a brother that's been living in the US for the past 10 years.
These types of laws are much more common and easier to implement over here because of our socialist democracies. US legislation tends to get blocked because "protecting the vulnerable" always takes a back seat to "infringing on freedoms". The simplest example of this is gun control.
I was bigtime into the Unreal Tournament modding scene in like 99-00. Creating new maps, new mechanics, it was pretty sweet!
Work in Vegas. Can confirm the gaming floor management well radio at least one cocktail waitress or a host to babysit a whale while they gamble, they will also give them a dedicated table and dealer if that's what they want to play.
Loot boxes also directly prey upon the collectors impulse, which is a real thing and pokemon literally made their money tapping into this by having a pokedex. The difference is I dont pay 5 quid for a poke ball to open and maybe get the pokemon I need. I have bought them in the past on overwatch because I was really into certain skins that I wanted and i felt used
@@JayceCH. no, dude, they mean the literal canonical existence of the Pokedex in game, which tracks what you've collected in the game, not the out of game pokedex. The existence of the pokedex in a pokemon game is meant to get you to keep playing to collect, that's what they mean.
@@gentlebaguette218 thanks, yeah. I was talking about your average main series pokemon game
32:59 "Gacha" is basically another name for "lootbox", so you should care about gacha games as lootboxes are litterally their core mechanic. xD
According to urban dictionary: "Gacha (or Gachapon) is a monetisation technique used in many successful Japanese free-to-play games. Originally a term used for Japanese Toy machines, this is used to describe games that pull a selection of data, people, heroes, etc. from a large pool at random. "
Gacha, lootboxes, day 1 DLC, pre-orders...the video game industry is generally full of horrible practices in desperate need of regulation.
I don't think a Casino is worse, cause you walk in to a Casino knowing you walk in to a Casino. While you buy a Game to actually have fun and play a game. Not to spend money or to make money. People with Gambling addictions should not go in to Casinos and many probably know that and don't even walk in to them. While a Videogame is "its a game" they buy it and they fall in to the Gambling trap from the videogames they actually just wanted to play.
We need regulations and laws. Selling game is ok, offering multi play on servers for subscription is ok but any kind of monetization and game shop should be illegal, also paying to get advertisement free game should be ilegal. no loot boxes, no vip deals, off line playing single player game is a must not just rare option. Do not forget that now days games training millions of kids to be future addicted gamblers.
It's beyond me how hearthstone is never involved in the discussion of loot boxes so many years.
@@Eaglebrace there is a difference: physical cards are still worth something in real world value. Digital cards? Worth nothing.
@@shcdemolisher booster packs can be a key gameplay or deckbuilding element themselves, see Booster Draft or Sealed in MTG which are highly popular formats.
@@Eaglebrace there are fundamental differences. It's my impression that TCG enthusiasts are driven by the collection aspect and are not active players. The value and validation comes from having the rarest cards and flexing over other collectors. On eBay there will be a single card sold for thousands of dollars. While Hearthstone is all about gameplay. People chase collections to be enabled to construct decks they want to play. Have you seen anyone on the internet ever boasting on having shudderlock or selling their account with it ? No.
Opening packs in HS for me is the same as loot boxes is by definition - your gameplay depends heavily on it, good luck on having variety of decks to keep your gameplay fresh and fun, and When you go on a streak of opening packs full of worthless cards and finally see a legendary card screen is shacking, card is exploding while revealing, inkeeper yelling at you, you feel instant gratification and satisfaction that you might got anything useful.
I wouldn't have had issues with it if wasn't such a blatant cash grab with these tedious grinds for f2p players or astronomical prices for bundles
@@Eaglebrace for mtg at least not many are cracking packs trying to get a specific card . Most people buy singles and use packs for drafting.
Gacha games are lootboxes but worse cuz it combines everything that he hates about lootboxes and the things that he doesn't hate about microtransactions (i hate pay to win microtransactions but not as much as p2w lootboxes)
It has pay to win with chances to not win any value (example: getting a duplicate character, weapon or skin).
The gacha lootboxes have characters and cosmetics they can instead sell for a set price but they don't.
The gacha lootboxes also have weapons etc making the actual game almost unplayable without the lootboxes making the "game" 80% gambling.
All that is combined in the fact that lootboxes are p2w, and gambling but for kids.
Idk how anyone can play Gacha games. They're literally laughing at you in the genre of game - "HA! Gacha! Gacha to pay money that could have been infinitely more useful anywhere else."
1 of the main reasons RS initially died was when they introduced the “Squeal of Fortune” which was essentially a loot box
what do you mean you are not paying for the game (wow) ? The game always cost money. When I bought it for the first time it cost money, and every expansion they released cost money. So the game it self absolutely cost money.
Everything you tolerate in Freemium games will be introduced to Premium games.
Everything you tolerate in Console games will be introduced to PC games.
"Slippery slope" is only a fallacy when predictive validity is low, otherwise we call it a Trend.
@@scottneil1187 In my experience, there's a lot more tolerance for terrible performance and low/capped fps among console players because those platforms have traditionally needed them to function properly. That's how you get things like game speed being tied to fps (e.g. in Fallout 76 or Toukiden: Kiwami) and 30 fps locked cutscenes (e.g. Nier Automata) on significantly stronger hardware in the ports. Those things are then absolutely shat on by the pc customer base, but the sales are still good enough to where companies don't have to give a crap. Often times thanks to the "I don't need more than 25 fps to play a game, everyone else is just whiny" crowd who will defend every single fault of these titles. Now, a game doesn't need to be a console port for these issues to happen but it really doesn't help if so many people blindly accept mediocrity.
Always-Online singleplayer-games were very much a Console thing before they were shoveled down the throats of PC users.
Console gamers also allow their entire libraries to be locked behind a single first-party storefront, which is now slowly becoming the case for PC - So much so that as megacorporations like Microsoft hasten that direction, WoWcucks actually praise the action.
The death of SplitScreen Hotseat Multiplayer in most games was tolerated in Consoles before it came to PC, just like the death of Local/LAN multiplayer.
Everything time some shill supports something on the grounds of it being "just on phones" or "just in free games" they end up looking like an ass as, every time, they same things they allowed for free stuff ends up ruining what was supposed to be premium stuff.
I’m not gonna lie I had no issues paying for map packs in shooters or expansions to WoW but buying skins that outshine the available ones in game, xp boosts or even items that are objectively better just feels really bad.
Micro transactions and loot boxes are no different than gambling. The thrill of possibly getting something for your effort. The bells and whistles. That tiny rush of dopamine you get. It works all the same buttons in the brain as sitting at a table in a casino. Don't discount that addiction simply because it doesn't affect you or you don't understand the inability to say no.
The thing about TCGs is that they aren't as randomized as people think. Also, the trading is a really big aspect of the cards not being gambling. I do have an issue with games like Magic Arena though, because if you get 5 crappy packs of cards, you're screwed. Even hearthstone allows you to trade in cards you don't want in order to get specific cards
23:15 to add onto this, casino chips are physical objects. The animal side of our brain will still say "this object is mine" and not want to part with it, because at a basal level we recognize it as our personal possession. It's less of a block than physical money, but more than any sort of digital token. Imagine if casinos did use virtual chips on e.g. an RFID chip.
I also don't hate lootboxes, because my personal policy is that I will only buy it if I am okay with any outcome of the lootbox. However, it does need to be better regulated in some way - not everyone has the same policy, and as you said gambling addicts won't evaluate them critically.
The biggest problem is that there every game tries to be a live service game now. Very few games are releasing "whole" with modding tools(for community to make extra content) and with DLC just being extra content you pay for ONE TIME that adds substantially to the game. Now every game is "live service" and "continually developed" so they can milk customers with content that in the past would have been included in one large mission pack or created by the community. The reason people were especially angry about horse armor was specifically because it signalled the end of community content(game communities have been making free customizations for games forever up to that point) and the heralding of paid dlc for every nickle and dime game companies could take you for.
I made an experiment out of myself with a certain game...
You can trust me when I say, even if you try to watch yourself, dopamine acts invisibly.
It is incredible how you can stumble whether to your own nature on a certain platform, or in reality to scammers.
To be secure against falling the first thing you have to learn is to notice the signs with who/what you are interacting; Then you have to learn to set yourself up to win, by not playing their game.
Lootboxes aren't illegal in the Netherlands. It is only illegal if it is BOTH random and tradable. If it either isn't random (direct purchase items) or cannot be traded it isn't illegal. So games like CS:GO got into trouble, but most gatcha's are fine currently.
I can't understand logic of dumb people constantly paying. It's incredibly hard to force me to buy a game at all. First I play it for free, and then I will pay it only and if I liked the game. Or if I purchased collector's edition.
Biggest problem with gambling in video games is that I can ban myself from gambling from establishments in australia to keep myself away, but then I come home to video games and it's at home when i am trying to chill out! Lucky for me I stopped but it was a serious problem for me
nice job getting out of the habit 👍
Small bit regarding health insurance pricing...
They doesnt charge for ensured customers the market price, is a standard price calculated on an average across all customers including non-related spences like fees, administrative staff and even eletricity bills for their HQ...
Its so complex and convoluted that is almost impossible to make reason, and its intentional to be complex, because its harder to audit
28:32 and i feel like game lootboxes are worse because #1 you're basically letting kids play the slots as casinos are a tleast regulated with age restrictions going as far as even being illegal in some countries #2 The profit people are expecting still exists, just not monetary in most cases.
#3 Value in microtransactions is way more obfuscated and harder to look though. especially with online payments nowadays a few bucks are spent very quickly, and do you seriously think about every single dollar you're paying for?
that's the scheme behind micro transactions: a lot of small transactions to fool you into thinking "it's not that much". Most of those ganes don't even have a easily visible transaction history, so how are you going to know how much you paid except by checking your bank calculating a lot of numbers, and when are you doing that?
#4 Those companies hire psychologists specifically to trick us into buying what is essentially nothing.
lol brigs up aoc, gets called out, malds out
The price skimming actually doesn't apply to medical. A doctor can charge an insurance whatever they want but the insurance has a set fee schedule of what is allowable and they pay based on that procedure code and the fee schedule. They can charge $250 but their fee schedule is around $75 so the insurance company will only pay $75. The doctor has to write off the difference between what they billed and what the insurance allows. Price skimming doesn't work in the medical community since the 80's -- just an fyi
I agree with the point about the lack of financial responsability, that's why companies try to target teens and even kids with microtransactions they don't have that knowledge and don't understand the value of money. And for older people they are predatory towards gambling addicts, and the sad thing is a lot of gambling addicts try to find other hobbys to avoid going to a casino as a reabilitation process, just to be captured by a free to play game and even pay games with gambling mechanics even if they are only cosmetic.
The Elder Scroll's horse event perfectly shows how gamers operate, complain very vocally about something, but buy it anyway. Money speaks louder than words, nobody cares about our support, opinions and feelings, only about our money.
the other insidious trick with using alternate forms of currencies such as gems etc is they trick you to always buy uneven amounts of gem with cash purchases. say 20 bucks will get 1800 gems but an item in the store is 2000 gems or the reverse you buy something worth 1200 gems leaving 600 gems that isn't enough to buy something else so you end up spending more cash in loop and so on.
God bless those editors
I literally made a fucking spreadsheet for conversions for a Free-to-play game I played for a while.
I'm fine with most micotransactions (except lootboxes, but Asmongold did a great job explaining why they are different), with one big caveat: Transparency and Loyalty. What I mean is I hate it when a game has no or only cosmetic transactions, but then suddenly the cash shop opens up and shifts the whole system. If I start playing a game the microtransaction level should stay the same.
Magic the Gathering. The next pack will definitely give you that rare you need for your deck, or some valuable chase card to sell or trade, you just need to buy more packs. At least that gives you a physical product, people are using the same mindset for pixels.
Zack is the GOAT, I swear. The amount of entertainment and laughs I got out of this.
If you think gaming financial advice is funny that you are probably one of those that accidently spent 200 $
people who compare loot boxes in video games with TCGs are missing the point by a mile. With TCGs you still buy a physical product and there is a huge legal secondary market. Want a specific card? Just buy it on the secondary market, easy. The booster packs are just for people who wanna open the packs themselves and sure there's always a gambling aspect with hoping you'll get cards that are worth more than what you spent, but the point is, you have a choice. In video games you don't. You can't just buy the items outright and in the most occasions, there is no legal secondary market.
In MTG there are also formats like Sealed or Draft which only function because of booster packs. They require highly different strategies compared to constructed formats like Standard or Modern.
@Urazz exactly. Hasbro can stop printing new cards, won't make me lose the ones I already have, won't make my friends lose theirs, we will always be able to play with the decks we posess. We don't depend on a third party to host our product indefinitely
27:00 when asmongold got to this point, I feel he fucked up hard.
The point the F2P model wants to point you towards is not seeing the 100 pulls at 2$ a piece.
Financially responsible is easy to throw around, but would asmongold say he hasn’t dropped 200$ on things that are not “finally responsible” as well?
yeah i also don't think those people should be blamed, it's the failure of the education system and most of all are those abusive companies to blame.
Saying "people falling for micro transactions are morons" is like saying "people getting scammed are idiots", "if the kid gets eaten by a lion it's the kids fault" basically a survival of the fittest mindset. It's just very egoistical to think like that but that's generally the biggest problem our society is facing rn.
As a amateur indie game developer I avoid this new greedy toxic culture at all cost. My game means the world to me, I would never ruin any of it by in-game purchases or other addictive gambling crap just to earn more money. I much rather sell poorly than to be a sellout.
Doing something your passionate about vs doing it to make money. The big devs have lost the passion/have people pushing profits over quality.
@@Mike-pn8ln yeah, agreed. Such a shame. Thats a sad circle of truth, that way to often repeats itself 😭
Another part of this is the complicity of the ESRB and other game rating companies who could at least alter the ratings to games with gatcha and loot boxes to an M or NC-17 rating because it's literally gambling. The fact they choose not to while having a 'Tools for Parents' on their website is fucking evil. These things are all gambling 100%. It should be totally illegal, or rating systems should change as an absolute bare minimum, that's for damn sure.
I completely agree. Sadly it’ll take an industry rebuild and the powers of law that be need a massive update or Atleast be heavily informed of what this is. Thankfully as we saw in Europe, they made sure such things like that can’t happen in games. Over here in the US? Not likely unless it’s an action from all 50 states to every game maker and publisher in the world.
250 for a simple doctor's visit? Holy crap. And people are still against general health care?!
Here in Belgium we pay amongst the highest amount of taxes in the world (sometimes even the most) but a general GP visit costs about 28euro, of which I get refunded 22...
Fun Fact, or not so fun: your copay (what you pay) for medicaments from the pharmacy can be higher than when you just pay for the whole cost of medicaments yourself.
If you ask them, the pharmacy has to disclose how much it would cost you to buy the meds outrigt and howmuch the copay would be.
They are contratly obligated to ONLY disclose this IF you ask them, otherwise they HAVE to charge you the copay, even if the copay is much higher...
There was a vid, but i dont remember from who this was, where this pracise is shown.
As a Korean I've heard Wallstreet level derivatives in NC soft games(Lineage series)....
You western guys might not understand how could multi millions of dollars be paid in video game. 'So what sword has price of $1M?'
No, no..., buddy. There is a stack of system.
At the lowest level there is consumables literally works like an respiratory to gain experience points 'as other people gets'. Without it you cannot get loots practically and only achieve tiny portion of golds.
And above it there is multiple item reforging / fusioning systems, requires multi stages of reforging / fusioning. Of course as your item reaches higher it costs more and have more chances to fail, and if it fails it downgrades or disappears to ash. Chances could go down to multiple fraction of a single percent.
And there is collectables.Various collection sets give player a little bits of advantages. Because they are competative games, whales compete with other whales, killed by other whales, humilated by other whales - so they races to maximum. Of course collectables are multi-staged and has success/failure ratio of each stages. They could be items, discoveries, lootbox picks, achievements etc. Each primitive trials requires 'gems' converted from real world cash, but after that its all complex financial system is fueled with gem based metaeconomy (of course there is multiple required types of 'gems' preventing direct exchange from $$$).
Collections of 100 things could be fabricated with 70 of 40% items, 20 of 10% items, 5 of 1% items, 3 of 0.1% items, 2 of 0.01% items. Of course people having 98/100 collection will eager to pay more, right? This example is pretty naive because there is many things below 0.0001% out there - for example "Crafting recipe for Legendary weapon carving, consumable" in Lineage Mobile has 0.00001% chance of loot from specific crate. Oh, and of course the crate cannot be bought individually, it only can be bought as a package with other thingies.
I think game monetization is becoming like financial engineering. As most people do not care much about complexity of Wallstreet's black magic, Most people do not play that crazy games and pay that much. but there is certainly an abyss of details between 'this game has P2W' and 'this is NCsoft game'.
a good one to look at is how rocket league removed loot boxes and replaced it with direct sales and got a bunch of backlash because people enjoyed it and they had to publicly show how much more money people were spending to get items. or the cost to get a rare via loot boxes compared to paying for it, was like 5-10x
My opion on lootboxes: if you are getting whatever you know is guarenteed like the "giga ultra staff" but get bonuses along with it I believe that's fine. Whats not fine is putting a timer or the more you progressively buy the higher chance you have getting that item or even buying until you get a 100% guarantee is dum. You should be paying and knowing what you're getting and not spending money for a dumb outcome of a few stickers. I personally am not the smartest for falling into this trap when I was a teenager buying rare crates in COD black ops 3 that increase the chance of me getting a classified weapon.
I have to respectfully disagree on the loot boxes. I think it should be perfectly legal and regulated the same as a real money slot machine. You want loot boxes, fine, but your game is automatically AO and you have to deal with every states gaming commission.
As a software developer this feels like an advertisement that I should make a small group of 5-10 people to create a puzzle rpg mobile game with loot boxes and gambling mechanics.
Now I just need 1-2 artists/animators, 1 sound designer, and a couple more developers and we'll be making a million a month each easy enough. And then quit our real jobs and work on a real passion project while giving some minimal support to the mobile game.
ESO and their crates is a good example. Just about all their mounts, pets, costumes, etc come from those crates.
What if wow put in a weekly random reward with one drop for pve and one drop for pvp and it gave the player a chance of getting a cash shop item for free? Strictly in game currency from playing the game and you can get gold, rep items, crafting materials or if you're lucky, a cash shop item. It'd remove a lot of stigma surrounding ppl who have these items and give people a pretty good reason to log on every week. It would also be a pretty good PR move.
I don’t know why but I love seeing Asmon stunlocked by chat lol
You always ask at every pharmacy how much without insurance sometimes is straight up cheaper for you to not use insurance
the main thing i despise about microtransactions is games that are advertised as free to play but itturns out many areas in the game are locked behind a paywall. wizard 101 for example was bs last time i played it lets you accept the quests for premium areas and the poor kid that just wants to have fun beinga witch or wizard gets hit with a stupid pop up feels lied to then leaves the game because they know thier parents wont let them have the cash needed to acess the rest of the game,paywalls that are sneaked in like this are especially evil if its in a kids game im almost mad enough to make a petition to get that shit regulated.
Let's all agree that whenever asmonGold uploads our days get so much better ❤️
Bro shut the f*ck up you piece of shit bot. Comment bots are the scum of youtube
If you're a gamer from europe, you have most likely heard of Metin2 - perfect example of the endgame of predatory p2w microtransactions 😬
There's a surprising amount of stuff where 'well the system takes advantage of them but they should know better' is used to reduce pressure on the people who benefit from abusing idiots. Idiots will never go away and an idiots money might be better spent on legitimate exchange instead of infinite mtx greed for digital power.
i mean technically people shouldnt really blame Idiots for being idiots just because the education system failed, they should blame the education system.
25:30 not always the case. I spent a lot of money 5 years ago on some random game not because i was stupid but because i was in a vulnerable spot. I was going through a particularly rough patch at the time that caused me enought stress to where it affected me physically. This also caused me to spend money just to feel good. I knew it wasn't okay but i still did it. Once life got better i came around and dropped that game. I still regret spending all that money.
glad someone else noticed this! because as well you have people with things like ADHD where Impulse control is something they really suffer with! and its not because they're 'Morons' its because they probably dont have or cant get systems to help them.
I'm only okay with cosmetic microtransactions in a full priced game if:
1. They are up front to me about implementing it to the game.
2. That it doesn't get implemented on DAY ONE! Because then they cut content out of the game in order to sell me it seperately.
Also, cosmetic microtransactions can ruin peoples experience of the game.
I loved playing Siege A LOT back in the day, but the moment they implemented unicorn helmets to the operators i couldn't take the game seriously anymore, and i haven't logged on the game since.
Ready or Not is more like the experience i wanted for Siege, but they took the money route.
TES wasnt the first DLC kinda. Halo 2 had an expansion that were bought as a CD, the multilpayer pack, it was 2005. Also glad that Price Skimming is forbidden in my country at all. Imagine living in the US.
If I'd had to pick one to be removed between store mounts, loot boxes, or wow token. I'd would pick lootboxes.
3:49 no amount of "optional" will excuse bad game design, thte game is BUILT to make you hate playing it until you pay.
Umm I was kinda laughing at 32:00 because Asmon had no clue what "gacha" games are or meant and he says "I'm not talking about that." :D
Gacha = You have a lootbox where you have a chance (gambling) of pulling the ultra rare (0.1% chance) mega superweapon, which is EXACTLY what he was talking about. The only difference between a lootbox and a gacha is that gacha isn't presented to be in a box.
I really like how Blizzard does loot boxes tbh kinda as you mentioned it is available to buy outright anyway but also you can get it through in-game currency/achievement (like leveling up on overwatch/HOTS).
the most addictive drug for gamers, " you are strong, bro".
The best games are the ones where you pay once for the main game, and later on delivers free dlc content.
It's ok to pay for dlc's for a lower price than what the main game costs.
The Witcher 3.
asmons malding towards the end was hilarious to me
When store mounts came up with continual development.
Here's how I think asmon would cut it.
GW2, pay to enter. Store mounts = fine
Wow/ff14, subscription. Store mounts = no go
One correction, Asmon is incorrect when he says that hospitals bill insurance for more and the uninsured for less. It is actually the other way around. Uninsured people are actually charged far more than insured people; often being charged the maximum amount for any service. This makes sense because the whole idea behind private insurance is that they are able to negotiate for lower prices in exchange for offering their pool of potential patients. This is why insurance companies have "in network" and "out of network" price differences because they have negotiated a lower price with that particular health group.
Moreover, when you look at your hospital bill, the amount that is quoted as "billed to insurance" is not what the insurance company actually pays. The amount is usually far lower. The reason the actual payment is not shown is because neither the hospital, nor the insurance company want the real cost shown. The insurance company benefits because their client pool believes they are getting a better deal than they actually are. Healthcare providers do not want to tip their hand on what the real negotiated price is because it puts them in a worse bargain position when they have to deal with other insurance companies; not to mention disgruntled uninsured patients who will balk at the large price discrepancy.
I cant say for sure why Asmon has a lower uninsured bill. For starters, the ACA should have allowed Asmon to stay on his fathers insurance up until the age of 26, assuming Asmons father was still working at the time. There could have been some form of government assistance if it was his mother's bills through something like Medicare/Medicaid/Federal Disability. Usually those agencies are billed first, and then you receive the bill for your portion. Often it is not reflected how much these agencies have paid, as it is up to the healthcare agency to disclose the amount that the government has paid. This information is obtainable, but you have to go looking for it.
Even if we are talking about Asmon specifically, there could be other reasons why the bill was lower, as just about every healthcare facility does things a little differently. However, in broad strokes, the uninsured still pay the highest amount out of pocket compared to the insured. If you want to read a good article concerning how hospitals price their services, I recommend looking up an article called "Bitter Pill" from Times Magazine. It is about 9 years old, but he central point still hold just as true today as it did then.
I am no living in States, but in Australia, if you didn’t have private health insurance, you can either find services charged you more or less. It all depends on different service providers. It’s also happened when you have full car insurance, your panel beater will charge few thousands dollar to insurance company, however if you didn’t have insurance for your car, they usually charge few hundreds dollars to you.
Goddamn asmon was on point here while taking no bs from chat, love him for that. Btw i love running around in default skins while being at the top of the leaderbord, and then after the match getting messages about me being a cheater!
20:17 Rare Asmon smile.
WoW Ascension is pretty cool because it's free to play and you can buy the donation points with gold in the game... but of course it's bought from others who either bought it with gold, or actual money.
this man is CRANKIN' the content out recently
I think casinos are worse too... In ISOLATION. But you can't do it everywhere, and when you do you at least have a surface level expectation that it is "regulated". Anyone can download a free game, so the damage is bigger, and the profit margins bigger still.
... Aren't gacha games essentially lootboxes anyway?
the funiest shit about "MICROtransactions" to me is the fact that they usually go up to $99 on mobile games ... so basicly more expensive than a full AAA game ... how is that a "MICROtransaction" ? it's a full on transaction ...
The Full content of a Hearthstone expansion costs about 400-600 dollars. Of you wanted to not spend any money, you would have to play 10 hours a day… for half a year.